new blogs

yeah, me too

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posted by tom / September 11, 2006 /

It's pretty weird and sad to write this. But yeah, this seems to be the end of zunta. It's been a difficult year. That's about all there is to say, I guess.

Both of us like blogging, and I'm sure both of us will resume doing it elsewhere. More on that when we both figure it out. Or maybe not — to be honest, having one's audience expand beyond your friends and anonymous internet weirdos gets to be a little bit paralyzing, inevitable though it may be.

This site will stay up, if only because I need to be able to google the last few years' worth of posts. Maybe we'll syndicate our feeds here or something — I donno. I'd hate for this to be the last thing on the front page.

farewell

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posted by catherine / September 11, 2006 /

hi folks,

i'm sorry to say it, but i'm not going to be blogging here at unrequited narcissism any longer. i do plan to start writing again - i'm not sure where or when. but if you'd like to keep up with me, you can shoot me an email at pablohoney at gmail dot com and i'll let you know where my next site will be, eventually.

it's been a good four years here, and i loved every minute of it. thanks for being such great readers.

love,
catherine

UPDATE: i've gotten around to setting up a new blog - just email me if you'd like to read.

UPDATE II: i totally lost some of the emails of all of you all who wanted to read and then i never responded. email me again if that's the case. pablohoney at gmail dot com.

a note

there are about two billion concerts i want to go to this fall at the 9:30 club and the black cat. it will be teh awesome.

the new facebook features really are as terrifyingly creepy as everyone is saying. but, as techcrunch notes, they're easily shut off. (UPDATE: i think maybe i'm wrong that they're easily shut off. it doesn't seem like there is one option to opt out of the newsfeed forever; you have to X out each indivdual item. facebook certainly should include an option to easily opt out. yup. hi, my name is catherine, i'm 26, and i use facebook.)
(UPDATE II: facebook wrote an extremely apologetic blog post and they will now let you opt out of any or all of the news feeds. as teofilo notes, though, there still seems to be no way to opt out of receiving the feed, unless i'm mistaken.)

i was recently informed that within 15 miles of each other, and a relatively short trip from atlanta, there exist both the cabbage patch kids factory (babyland general hospital), where cabbage patch kids are birthed, and helen, georgia, a bavarian-hamlet where all the people wear lederhosen and sell you chocolate and cuckoo clocks and have a big oktoberfest festival. georgia, in the grand tradition of every place i've ever lived, only seems to get more awesome the closer i get to leaving it.

walt disney wants your fingerprints

congratulations to my wonderful friend laura, whose article on walt disney's fingerprinting collection was published recently as part of the news 21 initiative on the future of journalism (read more about the program here). boing boing even picked it up, and you know that's when you've made it! anyway, i encourage you all to read it.

leftovers

Matt emailed me asking how to do the little photoset thingy I've got in the sidebar. I initially sent him back the code we're using, but it's got a lot of unnecessary stuff in it that serves to merge Catherine and my photosets, sort them, and distinguish them. I took another pass at it this morning and stripped all the unnecessary junk out. I figured that others might find it useful, too, so here you go.

It's not rocket science — this is very simple PHP. It's just that it makes use of a couple of useful third party libraries. You'll have to install those, which can admittedly be a pain in the ass, particularly in the case of PEAR. But it's definitely doable.

Of course, after doing all of this I remembered that Matt's on blogspot, and consequently is probably unable to install the necessary PEAR libraries (or even use this script). But some borderless IFRAME action should be able to get around that (hacky though it may be). For folks with webhosts of their own, there shouldn't be any problem.

going, going

I'm only about 20 yards (sorry, meters) from the departure gate, so it seems like I'll actually be able to leave as planned. But, for the record, Gatwick Airport is terrible. It's understaffed, indifferently designed, and it costs $25 to ride the train out to it (each way). I miss Stansted.

But it's not all bad. The airport staff have been uniformly pleasant. And security, although thorough, did me the favor of failing to locate the eyedrops I was smuggling. If anyone has any suggestions for how to terrorize a flight with about half an ounce of saline solution, please leave them in comments.

I'm glad to be going home, simply because at this point I've been exhausted for as long as I can remember — certainly dating to well before this trip. But I'm sad to leave England, too. I like this place. The people are nice, the beer is great, and if you can avoid getting hit by a car barrelling down an unexpected side of the street, you can have a pretty good time.

Mostly, though, I just like the Englishness. The urinals flush when you use the sink! I think it's that sort of sweet-natured belief in mankind's capacity for civilization that makes this country so admirable (while simultaneously dooming their empire from day one).

So I'll be back soon. Ryan and Lisa have a pull-out couch, I still have a pocket full of inscrutable coins, and there may be a training session for GPUK — I pretty much have to come back.

For now, though, I'm looking forward to seeing you all back in the colonies.

insert requisite clash reference here

So, I've been in London. Need proof? Here's a shot of me with one of their ridiculous electrical outlets.

Word to the wise: you can shove an Italian power adapter in there just fine if you use a pen cap to trip the safety latch on the ground plug. It works like a charm, and provides a bracing ozone scent to liven up the air in the room.

You would think I'd have more blog fodder, what with being in a foreign country and all. The truth is that I've been much too busy and jetlagged to observe anything, much less write it up. See also: the enormous bags under my eyes in the photo above. And that was taken after a solid, 11-hour night of sleep. It's been a taxing week, for a variety of reasons.

But everything is working out, I think. I'm over here with my coworkers/friends/fellow cult-members (depending on the time of day and who you ask) Michael and Cristen, doing a strategy session and website kickoff meeting for Greenpeace UK.

It's stressful, trying to appear clever enough to justify being flown across an ocean — particularly when you have to do it for several days in a row. But the GPUK people have made it a breeze. I can't recommend working with smart, passionate clients highly enough — it's definitely one of the great things about this job. And if those clients will take you out drinking after a day of meetings, so much the better.

Anyway, there are some photos up on Flickr, including some shots of GPUK's awesome headquarters. Today's Michael's birthday, so additional drinks will be had (with Ryan & Lisa, no less!), and photos taken. Will there be moblogging from the airport? If British security takes away as many of my electronic entertainments as I expect (but not as many as they could), it's a definite possibility.

f.w. in the house

mark your calendars: the next f.w. thomas performance will be at the warehouse monday, september 18. i especially like the promise of how "F.W. Thomas Impresario and Master of Ceremonies Adam Mazmanian will explain what it is like to watch one's father slowly but inexorably transform into a doppelganger of Kim Jong-Il."